This project investigates changing American attitudes toward and the treatment of the deviant and dependent, focusing on the issue of incarceration and its alternatives in the twentieth century. It explores the causes and implications of the shift in public policy toward the criminal, insane, poor, orphan, and delinquent, a shift from an unquestioning and almost total reliance upon institutionalization, to an effort, sometimes successful and sometimes not, sometimes begrudging and sometimes enthusiastic, to devise and adminster community-based forms of care and punishments. In l900, caretaker institutions dominated the field of charity and corrections. Then, beginning in the Progressive period (l900-l920), and continuing thereafter, new programs affected each of these groups, offering substitutes for incarceration. Probation and parole became alternatives to the penitentiary, community mental health clinics and furloughs, alternatives to prolonged asylum care. Relief in the community through such programs as widow pension, lessened public reliance upon the almshouse, while new adoption laws, foster home programs and juvenile court proceedings reduced the importance of the orphan asylum and reformatory. The origins of these programs and their subsequent developments, the tensions between a policy of incarceration and these alternatives, the elements that encouraged or inhibited change, provide the focus for this research. The project will explore these issues most intensively for the period l900 to l945. It will also draw up a check-list of where we stand now on incarceration, and offer, on the basis of our past efforts, some policy guidelines for future change.